Book Review: It Still Moves by Amanda Petrusich

Title: It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music
Author: Amanda Petrusich
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Released: Fall of 2008
Rating: A+








If you are like me and every other twenty-whatever-year old then you occasionally (or maybe all the time) flip through Paste Magazine or click through Pitchfork getting all the best info on all of your favorite bands, some hyper-critical reviews, and a face-to-face introduction to a slew of bands that you can't stop listening to. I have been a fairly avid follower of both over the past couple of years, and I started to notice something a little over a year ago. A lot of my favorite pieces and reviews happened to have the same name stamped below them; that name was Amanda Petrusich. So, naturally when I read on Pitchfork about Ms. Petrusich writing and releasing a book about the American Musical Landscape, I couldn't wait to read it!! I later caught an excerpt from the book and it only whetted my appetite for what seemed to be an incredible dissection of American music and how to draw a line from the past to the present.

The book is told as a travelogue. Amanda hopped in her car and drove to Memphis to learn everything she could about Americana and American music. Her travels lead her through sleepy little Mississippi hallows, through the denim throes of Nashville/Cashville, and even on up to a wintry hamlet in New England. Along the way she stops everywhere in between and lets you know about it all.

The thing I love about this book is that it is concerned with the details more than the big picture. Petrusich seems to be more concerned with what Ramblin' Jack Elliott would have had for dinner than anything else. But, Amanda Petrusich is privy to the fact that you can't appreciate the big picture fully, until you've combed through the little dots that make it up.

Her beach-combing is never pretentious or hurtful(an often-fault of Pitchfork), and it has a way of humanizing the mythology that has so vastly engulfed American music history. People like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Lead Belly, and the Carter Family are stuff of legends and Ms. Petrusich takes them off their pedestal with kid-gloves and carefully peels away the layers as if in an archaeological dig. When she's finished dusting off the cobwebs of these great American heroes, the seem tangible and fragile, and even more special because of it. This would be a great feat in itself, but the fact that it is blended so effortlessly with her seemingly endless knowledge about everything from Lomax to Will Oldham and everywhere in between is staggering and humbling. She has done her homework folks, and not just in facts and figures, in body and soul as well, in heart and in soil. She paints with every color in the spectrum, a seemingly endless pallet.

I couldn't recommend this book more because of her understanding of the importance of the small things and relating that to such a wonderful enterprise like American music. It's just one of those books where I neglect reading the last chapter for quite some time just in order to not let it end.

Highly, highly recommended. Check Amazon, or whatever. But buy it!!!!


P.s. She just happens to be an incredibly kind and accommodating person as well. Tops in my book.